My father-in-law took all of us (15 of us) to see The Incredibles this morning at 11:00am. The theater was pretty packed, and the movie seriously rocked.

The best part, though… my son Link (age 7) is terrified of movie theaters. They’re big, dark, and loud, and it’s all I can do to drag him into one. I finally got him settled next to me, and during the film he mostly sat curled up with his hands over his ears.

Then “Dash” (the short, fast kid in the previews) started really mixing it up with the bad guys, and Link got into the wish-fulfillment, fantasy-life thing that drags ALL of us who love superheroes into the genre. He giggled. He cheered. He took his hands off his ears and got into the movie. We (me and my boy) made a breakthrough. Sure, there were big, scary robo-monster things in the movie, but by the time they showed up, Link was INTO it, and he stuck it out.

Ahhh…

Right after the movie I ducked the whole family and went to Ann Morrison park for a round of Disc Golf. I ended up wading for my 167g Champion Valkyrie, and that put a bit of a (ahem) damper on things, but overall it was nice to play again. Except for the fact that my game sucked HARD. Sure, I sank a couple of cool putts, and threw a couple of great drives, but mostly I was wandering around muttering at my discs.

*sigh*

I’d have rather gone to see the movie again.

This evening we went to my neice’s baptism. I won’t trouble you with details, save to say that it was wonderful, very spiritual, and my sister-in-law can’t navigate. Fortunately, she navigated badly on the way HOME, so we weren’t late or anything. Just stressed out as we caravanned around Kuna, Idaho in smoky fogs worthy of Minas Morgul.

Oh yeah. This FOG. Wow. Any LJ users in the Boise area are welcome to weigh in with THEIR fog stories. This stuff has been a hazy annoyance all day (except in the center of town, so my wading for the Valkyrie was done in sunshine), but by 8pm it rolled in THICK, and stank of the coal fire from the sugar plant here in the vally. Wow.

–Howard

We arrived safely in Boise after a five-and-a-half hour drive. We’re up here for my niece’s baptism, and an accompanying “cousins’ party,” where my four kids get together with seven cousins and basically romp through my sister-in-law’s house like yahoos.

I’m not sure whatto do with myself here. I brought my drawing box, but I’m VACATIONING. That said, I’ll probably still end up doing some drawing, because it’s fun and I love it.

–Howard

Stedmen’s Medical Dictionary describes capsaicin as “a colorless irritant phenolic amide C₁₈H₂₇NO₃ that is found in various capsicums and that gives hot peppers their hotness .” The dictionary does NOT go on to say that when you’ve got capsaicin in it’s “colorless” state, the crystals are pretty much weapons-grade irritants. It’s the active ingredient in pepper spray, after all.

Peppers are typically measured on the Scoville scale, where you puree the pepper, and then dilute with water until you can’t taste the spice anymore. There are less subjective mechanisms now for generating the numbers, but to give you an example, Tabasco sauce rates around 2500, which means you have to add 2500 parts of water to one part Tabasco before it’s not spicy any longer. That may seem pretty hot, but Police grade pepper spray rates around 2,000,000. Pure capsaicin is up around 5.3 million, and apparently there are a couple of mutations of the molecule like Nordihydrocapsaicin which are even hotter.

Like it matters. When you’re up in the millions, capsaicin is a munition, not a foodstuff.

I love spicy food. I’ve got a bottle of hot sauce that rates between 40,000 and 75,000 Scoville — it’s called “Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce”– and last night I used it on the last of our leftover curried rice.

A word on capsaicin’s effects: if you get enough in your mouth, and it doesn’t take much at all, the pain and heat receptors shut down, but not before giving you a tremendous jolt. You get some endorphins as well. This is why people like extremely spicy food — there’s an endorphin rush associated with tricking your oral cavity into believing that you’ve eaten a live coal. Once you’ve had this experience, there is a gating effect, which means you can fire things up much hotter next time without feeling like you’re going to die.

So… about a week ago I was over at ‘s house, and I spread (yes, SPREAD) some Scoville 60k on a quesadilla already loaded with green chiles.

Last night’s curry was a non-event. I got four drops and a couple of dried-up bottleneck chunks into maybe a cup and a half of curried rice (with walnuts, apples, raisins, and green peppers… yum!) and sat down to watch a movie. I plowed through the rice like there was nothing on it. Sure, I could taste the heat. Yes, I got that endorphin kick. But there was no pain. This means I’ve successfully gated the nerves in my cake hole down several notches, to the point where I can eat Weapons of Mouth Destruction with relative impunity.

The sad thing… nobody else in my home likes spicy foods the way I do. We prepared that curry as mild as could be for the kids, and they STILL complained that it was too spicy. Thus, I’m relegated to doctoring leftovers for my capsaicin fix.

A little insight for you.

I tuned in to APOD a moment ago (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) and the article was on the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023. There was a link from that article to another article about PAH molecules forming in space.

My first exposure to the term PAH was in Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac, in which the main character is frying bacon and proclaims that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are his favorite flavor of carcinogen. The phrase has stuck with me. Recently I was reading up on PAH molecules elsewhere to try and figure out just how much of a cancer risk the backyard grilling is. Answer: not much. I’m at about 10 times higher risk for all the sunbathing I did as a kid.

This brings us to my recent mole removal, during which the doctor zapped things off of my back, and I commented that the smell of burnt me was not the tasty polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon smell of backyard grilling, but more like the smell of successfully lighting the grill after unsuccessfully lighting it and flooding the chamber with gas (e.g. the smell of burnt me).

So I’m reading this link about PAH in space, and all my current knowledge of PAH gets re-indexed in my head around the concept of stars pumping out molecules long considered the by-product of burnt organics. It then occurs to me that space-borne carcinogens have an infinitesimal cancer danger compared to the radiation blazing off of the star that made them, and I re-ruminate upon all that vanity-motivated sunburning I did as a teenager in Florida.

I’ve read other things today, too. In fact, I think I’ll go read some more of them now.

–Howard